Davina & the Vagabonds

DAVINA & THE VAGABONDS have created a stir on the national music scene with their high-energy live shows, level A musicianship, sharp-dressed professionalism, and Sowers’ commanding stage presence. With influences ranging from Fats Domino and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band to Aretha Franklin and Tom Waits, the band is converting audiences one show at a time, from Vancouver to Miami and across Europe. In 2011 Davina released her first full length, all original album Black Cloud . It was named one of the 10 best releases of the year by the Minneapolis Star & Tribune and awarded 4 ½ stars from Downbeat Magazine. Their next release in 2014, Sunshine, hit number 13 in the Billboard Blues Chart and led them to be a musicial feature on the hit BBC show, Later with Jools Holland.

DATV’s shows are filled with New Orleans charm, Memphis soul swagger, dark theatrical moments that evoke Kurt Weill, and tender gospel passages. Davina’s voice and stage presence defy category in a different way. Davina has been compared to Etta James, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday and Betty Boop, but comparisons don’t suffice: Sowers is a true original.

Bringing you 100 years of American music and Davina’s originals, which lend themselves to the American Songbook, the band brings edgy nostalgia to older generations and fresh new music to younger ears. This rollicking quintet is held together by Sowers’ keyboard playing, with acoustic bass, drums, and a spicy trumpet and trombone horn section. The group’s focused, clean sound and emphasis on acoustic instruments is novel to both blues and jazz worlds, and sets the show closer to New Orleans than to Chicago. This has set the Vagabonds apart at festivals in Thunder Bay, Ontario; Sighisoara, Romania; Sierre, Switzerland; Kemi, Finland; the 2012 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and 2013 Monterey Jazz Festival ( in 2014 was asked back to play their main stage in 2014, Vache de Blues in France, and North Sea Jazz Festival. Catch this one-of-a-kind live show while they are in town

Lucy Michelle is a songwriter as serious as they come. Twin Cities natives will know her as frontwoman of gypsy-pop outfit Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lapelles, a raucous and eclectic six-piece. At home and on the road, Lucy has stood boldly amidst that chugging whirlwind of cello and accordion, stomping her foot and singing out fiercely over the top of it all. It’s a collaboration five years strong whose catalogue reveals an artist developing not only her craft, but also personally. Through songs of adventure, love and reflection Lucy has shared an evolving understanding of herself and her values. It’s a process that in 2012 led Lucy, after becoming happily married, to write a batch of songs more deeply personal than any she’d written before. The result is Attack of the Heart, Lucy Michelle’s first ever solo album. Enlisting the help of local greats John Munson and Chan Polling, Lucy set out to create an American pop gem. It’s a hard-earned hallelujah at times reminiscent of Dylan’s contented spirit on ‘Nashville Skyline’ but with a strut all her own. “Heart Race”, the album’s opener, rolls in as gentle as a weekend sunrise upon a Minnesota lake.